Theatre review: The Trials

With climate catastrophe seeming more bleakly inevitable by the minute, you'd think the near future looked depressing enough without imagining an even more dystopian version of it; but fair play to Dawn King, whose The Trials goes for it anyway. At some point in the future, climate change has made the air outside unbreathable without masks, droughts and flooding are regular occurrences, and refugees have had to flee much of the planet for the few areas that are still just about habitable. Being the generation that will have to live with the consequences of what the preceding ones did, children and teenagers have seized control, and the twelve young protagonists of King's play have been called to two weeks' jury duty, to judge their elders' crimes. But these aren't politicians or industrialists who wilfully destroyed the environment for profit; all of them were tried long ago, and the spotlight has now moved onto anyone who could be considered to have done less than they could have to stop the disaster.

Stage-to-screen review: Good Grief

An intimate piece of theatre, created specially for streaming at home: Nearly a year into lockdown, can a one-act two-hander feel too different from a one-off TV drama? Natalie Abrahami has some ideas on how to make this feel, if not quite like theatre, like a hybrid of the two mediums as she directs Lorien Haynes' tragicomedy Good Grief for the screen. Adam (Nikesh Patel) has lost his partner Liv after eight years of cancer. Their friend Cat (Sian Clifford) is the last one left at his house after the wake, and one of the people who it seems best understands, if not entirely approves of, his eccentric ways of grieving. These include compartmentalising Liv's belongings around a house that's now far too big for just him in rooms like "the sad room" and "the boring room," and a lot of inappropriate humour, like opening the eulogy by mentioning Liv's extraordinary promiscuity before they got together.

Theatre review: Swive [Elizabeth]

I'm starting to think of the 2019/2020 Swanamaker season as "the chipboard season," given the material that's covered the stage for Henry VI, Richard III, and now the winter season's only premiere, Ella Hickson's Swive [Elizabeth]. It's revealed in a flourish that makes a very early bid for coup de théâtre of the year, as Hickson and director Natalie Abrahami remind us that for all its atmosphere and quaintness this theatre is actually barely six years old, and a biographical play about Elizabeth I (Abigail Cruttenden) might turn out to be surprisingly devoid of courtly niceties. In fact it's an 85-minute race through Elizabeth's life from toddler to menopause, and how her treatment by men throughout her life might have led her to dig her heels in against all the pressure to marry and produce an heir, and instead make the rule of England's only unmarried Queen one of the most iconic eras in history.

Theatre review: Anna

On the one hand, it's disappointing to have a show at the National where cheap tickets are very thin on the ground; on the other, I can't complain if this is part of a new policy not to sell Dorfman side seats if they offer no view of the stage whatsoever. The reason you need to watch Anna head-on or not at all is that Vicki Mortimer's set is entirely behind a letterbox of sound-proof glass. This is because Ella Hickson's play is co-created with star sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and making sure the audience hears, through headphones, only exactly what the creatives want them to hear is at the heart of the show. This is another show built on binaural sound, and the technology has obviously now progressed to the point that it can be made portable. And so everything we hear comes from the perspective of Phoebe Fox's titular character as she walks around her East Berlin flat.

Theatre review: Machinal

The Almeida’s current season of female playwrights now looks back to 1928 for a play whose expressionist style places it very firmly in that time, but whose script often feels almost unnervingly up-to-date. In Machinal, Sophie Treadwell despairs at the world treating all people like part of a machine, but there’s no question it’s women’s role in that machine that’s the particular target. Initially known only as Miss A, later revealed to be called Helen, Emily Berrington plays a young woman who works as a stenographer in a New York office where she doesn’t fit in, largely due to being the only one who openly admits she feels like she’s wasting her life there. Not that this deters the company vice-president, Jones (Jonathan Livingstone,) who proposes to her. Helen flinches at his touch, but she knows marriage is the expected next step in her life, and a wealthy husband would get her out of her 9-5 job, so she accepts.

Theatre review: Wings

Just like a plane, a stage, a sanitary towel or a bucket of fried chicken, Juliet Stevenson has Wings in Arthur Kopit’s 1979 Broadway play. The Young Vic’s revival sees her reunite with director Natalie Abrahami, who has a very specific vision for this story of a highly active older woman relearning how to interact with the world after suffering a stroke. Stevenson plays Emily Stilson, who not only piloted vintage planes but used to do wing-walks on them. But we meet her just as she has her stroke and she’s thrown into confusion, feeling at a disconnect as if she’s floating over the world. It’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative that Abrahami takes literally, having Stevenson fly on wires above the stage, initially unable to touch down on the ground.

Theatre review: Queen Anne

It'd be a bit optimistic to think it signals 2016 sorting out theatre's notorious gender imbalance, but I've started the year with a trio of plays centring on women. The third is Queen Anne, Helen Edmundson's attempt to restore the memory of a largely forgotten monarch, whose name nowadays is mostly likely to be followed by that of a piece of furniture. The last of the Stuarts, even before her reign began its central issue was the succession, and England was determined enough to avoid another Catholic king to spend years and a fortune on wars in Europe to prevent it. When her predecessor William III (Carl Prekopp) dies earlier than expected, Anne (Emma Cunniffe) has been unable to provide herself with a living heir, and the seventeen pregnancies she's had while trying have left her physically and mentally exhausted. But she still embraces her new responsibilities, determined to be remembered as England's fairest ruler*.

Theatre review: Ah, Wilderness!

The Young Vic website describes Ah, Wilderness! as "Eugene O'Neill's most delightful play," a field that with the best will in the world can't have that many runners in it. Elsewhere I've seen the blunter "Eugene O'Neill's only intentional comedy." It is a surprisingly sweet affair though, something of a love letter not just to a particular woman in the playwright's life, but to young love itself. It's the Fourth of July and an extended New England family gather at the home of local newspaper editor Nat Miller (Martin Marquez.) The obvious stand-in for a young O'Neill is the middle son, George MacKay's Richard, a likeably recognisable emo teenager in Natalie Abrahami's modern-dress production. Fond of reading the works of European playwrights and poets like Wilde and Shaw - much to the concern of his mother Essie (Janie Dee) - Richard has been sending overwrought love letters to a local girl. When her father catches on, he order her to break it off immediately.

Theatre review: Happy Days

I really should learn that if I've imposed a rule on myself it's probably for a good reason, and I should just follow it. But no, it's Juliet Stevenson starring, I thought, it's Natalie Abrahami directing, I thought, it's at the Young Vic, who've built themselves an identity of staging classics in exciting, dramatic new ways, I thought. Of course, the latter point is meaningless - reinterpretation was never on the cards with a writer whose estate is notorious for forbidding it, and regularly refuses performance rights to any production that deviates even slightly from the script. The writer is, of course, Samuel Beckett. The play is Happy Days, in which Stevenson plays the Fonz Winnie, buried up to her waist in sand, loud screams of static alerting her to when she must sleep and when wake up. But she chatters away cheerfully to her husband (David Beames,) who's scrabbling around in a hole in the ground nearby.

Theatre review: After Miss Julie

If TV period dramas have taught us one thing, it's that 1930s and '40s chauffeurs' primary function was to make themselves available for sex at the lady of the house's whim. And so it is in After Miss Julie, Patrick Marber's adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie. Marber makes the play's class relations particularly British by setting the play in a country house in 1945, on the night of Labour's election victory, with the working man and woman looking like they're about to get more of a say in the world. (Thanks to the Beautiful People soundtrack, "Things Can Only Get Better" is on my iPod, which chose to play it on my way home; wrong election, but the right idea.) Patrick Burnier's set makes the audience descend a long staircase to the ground level of the Maria, bringing us to the kitchen of a country house. Most of the staff are upstairs celebrating, and the master of the house is in London on business, but his daughter Miss Julie (Natalie Dormer) has stayed behind. Cook Christine (Polly Frame) has skipped the party though and is in the kitchen making a snack for chauffeur John (Kieran Bew) whom she's "unofficially" engaged to; she's also making a foul-smelling concoction intended to make Julie's lapdog miscarry its puppies.

Theatre review: The Kreutzer Sonata

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Although this is a returning production, the performance reviewed was technically a preview.

Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell may have finished their programme as Artistic Directors of the Gate but we have a bit longer to wait to see what Christopher Haydon will bring as the outgoing regime gets to do an encore: Abrahami's 2009 production The Kreutzer Sonata returns with the same cast and creatives. Tolstoy imagined his 1889 short story being publicly performed to the accompaniment of live music, so Nancy Harris' adaptation turns it into a monologue for Pozdynyshev (Hilton McRae.) A train journey brings on a confessional mood for Pozdynyshev and we get the story of his wife's suspected infidelity, and the Beethoven piece that the narrator blames. Designer Chloe Lamford's train compartment set is smashed up, aptly introducing a violent tone, and it uses the Gate's deep stage to provide background images to the story: As well as occasional projections the carriage walls also go transparent to reveal Sophie Scott and Tobias Beer, acting out the other two sides of the love triangle and providing the aforementioned music (piano and violin respectively.)

Though effective, these visuals are sparingly used, the piece ultimately being a showcase for McRae's tightly wound-up performance, shaking for most of the time with suppressed fury that only rarely, but devastatingly, gets unleashed. The Kreutzer Sonata is an intense little piece with a well-maintained sense of menace.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy, adapted by Nancy Harris, is booking until the 18th of February at the Gate Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.